Common to production design cycles are phases of product development that involve either novel conception or conception as a modification to an existing design template, the specification of components, a specification of how the components are related for function or assembly, the specification of form for each of the components, the selection and full specification of the component materials and the full specification of the product form, composition and assembly with sufficient detail to serve as factory input and compliance to industrial or government standards. Computers assist in the product design throughout the design cycle by facilitating pattern creation, product sketches and three-dimensional (3D) models of the product. The actual computational tools utilized by a product designer vary in the degree to which these computational tools are integrated into the design process varies. The computational tools utilized by large scale engineering are fully integrated, and the computational tools used in garment and clothing accessory design provide for incidental assistance during the design process.
The computational tools used for product design include 3D computer modeling tools, two-dimensional (2D) vector or image based tools, databases that provide efficient access to templates, components, products and standards, workflow management tools and groupware that allows teams to communicate and share documents, images, 2D and 3D models, and 3D animations or simulations, so that a proposed product can be examined by members of the development team during the stages of development.
A virtual world is a system supported by computers that maintains a dynamically changing model of a 3D world with a plurality of models of users, referred to as avatars. The avatars interact with the model or virtual world and can modify this world subject to the prescribed model physics of the worlds and a functional interface. The functional interface includes any combination of objects, actions or functional behavior that is coded by, invoked or implemented through a series of actions. A key aspect of virtual worlds is the explicit representation of each user as an entity that exists in the virtual world, i.e., the avatar. Each avatar interacts with the virtual world and is subject to experiences brought on by actions of others in the world or from the world itself. Virtual worlds allow groups that are remotely distributed in the real world to interact and work together through the interaction of avatars that are each controlled by one of the members of the remotely distributed group in the shared virtual space. In the virtual world, all of the avatars form an avatar group, and all of the members of this group in the virtual world are in close proximity and share a common experience of a world that they as a group can interact with and modify together.
The computational tools used in both the integrated environments that support large scale engineering and the isolated single-user applications that assist design in industries that are not fully integrated, e.g., textiles and clothing accessories design, while providing some level of increased productivity, contain inefficiencies. These inefficiencies result from a lack of a real time collaborative environment and can be costly to the overall production design. Systems and methods are desired that eliminate current inefficiencies of computational tools resulting from a lack of real time collaboration. Suitable systems and methods would provide a fully integrated work flow process in the context of a virtual world to maximize efficiency, bringing all the applications and databases required by a product designer into a common framework and allowing the collaboration in real time among arbitrary and remote groups of individuals that need to examine and to contribute to production design.